by Tracy Ostroff
Contributing Editor

Summary: In 1941, the Belgian Government presented the Friendship Building and Tower, a centerpiece of the Belgian Pavilion at that year’s World’s Fair, to Virginia Union University, a historically black college/university in the segregated South, in a gesture of international goodwill. However, prior to presenting the structure to the Richmond university, the Belgians removed the bell carillon from the Henry Van de Velde-designed building and gave it to President Herbert Hoover, who offered it to his alma mater, Stanford University. Now a nonprofit organization is working to raise funds and awareness to provide new bells for the tower and restore the 1939 building.

How do you … raise funds for a good cause in difficult economic times?

Bells for Peace is a nonprofit organization established in 2004 and based in Richmond, Va. It is working to fund the casting of 14 new bells from the same Dutch foundry as was used for the Van de Velde tower. Founder and President E. Dianne Watkins says the organization was created in memory of the late Dr. John Malcus Ellison Sr., her uncle and the first African-American president of Virginia Union University, and his wife, Elizabeth Balfour Ellison, a connoisseur of culture who greatly influenced her husband. Watkins, who was raised by her aunt and her uncle on the VUU campus, says Ellison single-handedly raised $500,000 to transport and reconstruct the Friendship Building at Virginia Union.

Now his niece, an honored educator who recently retired from the Richmond school district as coordinator of professional education, has taken up the mantle of securing funds to bring a carillon of bells to the 165-foot tower. The link between the bells at the Hoover Tower at Stanford and the Friendship Building, listed as a national landmark and Virginia Historic Site, only recently came to light in 2004, thanks to Internet research by Watkins and her brother, according to news reports of the discovery. Watkins is hopeful they will be able to fund a new set so they can chime for the first time on the VUU campus.

Fundraising efforts
The cost to manufacture, ship, and install the bells is about $600,000, Watkins confirms. She also says she hopes to raise $200,000 more for an endowment. So far, Bells for Peace has raised enough money for four bells, and the Belgium government has pledge funds for four more.

Family obligations and the dampened economy are keeping Watkins from going full-throttle with fundraising. She says it is tough in this environment to ask people to give, although she is persevering by appealing to the altruistic spirit. She is making her case for donations by linking the purchase of the new bells with the mission of the university, and elevating the discourse on five core areas: education, public health, economic stability, equality of justice, and international ties. “These are the tenets of a peaceful world.”

She is also focusing her appeals at targeted groups, such as soldiers who were inducted into service in the building during World War II, and received a $50,000 anonymous donation in response.

Raising public awareness of the issues important to Virginia Union has been Watkins’ strategy. She is hoping to catch the eye of larger media outlets to tell her story and that of Virginia Union, the school that sprang from Lumpkin’s Jail, a two-story brick house where hundreds of thousands of slaves were housed as they were brought into the country and sold to slave owners. Lumpkin eventually fell in love with one of his slaves, whom he freed and married and to whom he left the property when he died. She later leased it to a man who began teaching freed blacks, and that school grew into what became Virginia Union.

Historic link to today
In addition to designing the support system for the bells and new roofing of the tower to protect it from further decay, Commonwealth Architects of Richmond is heading up the effort to restore exterior components of the Belgian Building. The lack of funding will mandate that the construction be conducted in phases. Every effort is being made to restore the building to its 1941 appearance while meeting the demands of a contemporary teaching facility, notes Commonwealth Principal Richard Ford Jr., AIA.

Watkins is also, in her next wave of efforts, looking to link fundraising with historic preservation. Watkins notes that it is critically important to tell the story of this school and this building, particularly as so much African-American history has been lost or glossed over. The new bells, Watkins says, represent a new vision for excellence for every person, and a new day for people, regardless of race, religion, or creed.

“Here we have a story that because of Belgian control of the Congo, links us back to Africa. This is such a wonderful time in history for this project to flourish,” Watkins enthuses.